February 15, 2006

Growing Pains

Verizons CMO John Stratton gave a speech at the recently held Madison & Vine conference from Ad Age. This is a great piece of insight to the growing frustrations from a billion dollar advertisers on the changing media landscape and offerings from communication companies.

The points:"Your clients are absolutely in trouble and they are looking for you to save them.""What you've been selling for the last 50 years no longer works."

"Major marketing money is going to be in motion in the next decade and no one really yet understands exactly where it will land, if it even will land, or if it will just disappear altogether."

"Before they figure out where to put their money, your marketer clients will hire and fire agency after agency, seeking someone, anyone, who can tell them where they might go next."

"CMO average tenure, already famously brief, will get even shorter as CEOs begin to recognize how much money they are blowing on antiquated media plans."

"Your marketer clients are really seeking one thing and one thing only: an audience for the message they are trying to convey to the market place."

"But your clients actually need more than just an audience. One of the consequences of the evolution of our media-delivery systems over the last 10 years is that the audience you do ultimately find is much less receptive to the message you're trying to send. They are absolutely armed and ready to get to the content they want while avoiding the message you are trying to implant within it."

"They need much more than an audience. They need an audience that cares about what they have to say. They need their message to be relevant to the audience they are saying it to."